muhammad.meki@economics.ox.ac.uk

I am a researcher in development economics at the University of Oxford, where I hold a joint position between the Department of International Development and the Centre for Islamic Studies  (equivalent to tenure-track Assistant Professor). I am also affiliated with the Department of Economics and the Centre for the Study of African Economies. I completed my DPhil (PhD) in 2018 from the Department of Economics, Oxford (St John’s College), and I held a post-doctoral research fellowship until 2020 (Junior Research Fellow, Pembroke College, Oxford). I have also previously completed postgraduate degrees in finance (MSc, LSE), economics (PGDip, Cambridge), and development economics (MSc, Oxford). Prior to academia, I worked for five years as a trader in the financial markets, for Bank of America in London and Deutsche Bank in Singapore, where I traded European and Asian government bonds, foreign exchange derivatives and other fixed-income products. In my research, I am interested in the effect of equity-like financial contracts -- involving, for example, shared ownership of fixed assets, sharing of revenue streams, or profit sharing -- on the investment and growth of small firms. I have conducted fieldwork in Pakistan, Kenya and Bangladesh.

Publications

COVID-19 and the Future of Microfinance: Evidence and Insights from Pakistan (with Kashif Malik, Jonathan Morduch, Timothy Ogden, Simon Quinn and Farah Said) (2020). Oxford Review of Economic Policy, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/graa014 [Media coverage: MIT Technology Review]

Ongoing work

Levelling the Debt-Equity Playing Field: Evidence from a Belgian Policy Change

Microequity for Microenterprises: Evidence from Artefactual Field Experiments and a Survey

Higher Purchase: A Field Experiment in Asset-based Microfinance (with Faisal Bari, Kashif Malik, and Simon Quinn)

Microequity for Microdistributors: A Field Experiment in Kenya  (with Francesco Cordaro, Marcel Fafchamps, Colin Mayer, Simon Quinn, and Kate Roll) 

Microequity and Mentorship for Online Freelancers: A Field Experiment in Bangladesh (with Mehrab Bakhtiar, Simon Quinn, and Abu Shonchoy)